The Design Brief

This project represents a few ‘firsts’ for me:

• Complete an app design using Figma

• Screen capture the journey

• Present the project as a headliner for my Bumble application process

I wanted to create something that would help me stand out among the myriad of applications these tech companies get.

The Solution

Best case scenario: I get the chance to interview for a global and household brand name in social tech.

Worst case scenario: I have learned how to use Figma by leveraging the knowledge I already had in Adobe XD and Illustrator.

The idea of my reconstruction was not to redesign the app to improve, as I wanted to keep this project short and sweet. A redesign would be far more involving. Instead, I wanted to present the hiring manager at Bumble with an interactive experience that will hopefully leave a delightful impression, enough for me to receive a callback.

The Process

In the time lapse video, you’ll see that I went through Adobe Illustrator and XD before settling on Figma for the final product. This is because I wanted to design the app prototype in XD, but the lack of precise vector tools and guides (and my preference to use Illustrator) meant that I utilised Illustrator fo a lot of the static elements. Later, I couldn’t achieve my desired results in XD, so I moved over to Figma.

Navigating Problems

As I approached the middle of my project in XD, in which I wanted to add a draggable action to my scrollable profile element to ‘swipe left and right’, I couldn’t work out how to make this happen (in retrospect, the process I used in Figma could be applied to future projects in XD to solve this issue, so I learned something there).

Later in XD, I wanted to create buttons that linked to external URLs, which I found out has been a community desire for years, but has yet to be implemented. This is what fundamentally broke my concept for an external link to my CV and portfolio, therefore I moved over to Figma, as I’ve heard nothing but good things about the browser-based app.

Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back

However, this move meant I had to recreate the entire prototype, as exporting SVGs from XD and importing to Figma wasn’t cooperating with me.

In the end, I created my prototype to satisfaction with Figma.

Reflection

On reflection, I will seriously consider this app in the future as my go-to for prototyping given that XD is still lacking some desirable options.